In the womb, the umbilical cord feeds us through the centre of our body, the ‘navel’, and connects us to our mother. This fundamental experience transfers symbolically to our existence on the Earth plane, hence our natural propensity to locate the centre in our inner and outer landscape. Many cultural legends refer to the navel of their continent, island or territory as being a place to access time, symbolically manifesting not as a loop but as a vertical column called the ‘axis mundi’ or ‘world pillar’, which links heaven and hell, high and low, and the different dimensions.

Many ancient cultures built a central shrine at the navel of their kingdom where they controlled the natural energy of the landscape, symbolic of a serpent or dragon, by staking it to the ground and then fixing it to a central feature or object. Such ancient civilizations as Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt placed revered a sacred stone at their sacred centre seeing it as a fixed, unmovable point around which everything, including the heavens, revolved. Mecca in Saudi Arabia is the centre of the Islamic world which has as its focal point as a cube-shaped temple called the Kaaba, which houses a black meteoritic stone. For the early Christians and Jews, Jerusalem was the centre of the world and focus of their religion, its navel being the Temple Mount, a place also sacred to Islam. Various cosmological principles refer to a mountain at the centre of the Earth’s landmass being the source of the world’s rivers. The world’s five main religions of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam have all attached themselves to a symbolic ‘world mountain’.

At many of these sacred omphalos sites pilgrims came to honour the goddess of fertility and regeneration, seeking advice from this divine entity through an Oracle such as at Delphi, the centre of ancient Greece. The Etruscans (c. 900–300 BCE), an advanced Italian pre-Roman culture ruling over an area called Etruria known today as Tuscany and Umbria, built twelve great cities around a great temple dedicated to the Earth Mother who they called Uni. For them, the unseen power generated from the Earth was exclusively female, a mystical force enclosed in the womb of women. In their view, the feminine energy was the basis of all creation. For the peace-loving Etruscans, Uni was the universal parent, the dispenser of power and maternal nutrition for the land and all its living creatures, providing for their prosperity and growth. From this centre, twelve radiating lines would form twelve sectors in which twelve societies would live – each ruled by one of the astrological signs and each having their own regional centre.

The Etruscan method of surveying gave us an insight into the earliest methods of geomancy and cosmology. They divided each of their cities into four, the central crossroad aligned to the cardinal points and where they dug a well in order to create an harmonious integration and connection with the cosmic stations governed by the gods. Their knowledge of the land and its sacred sites was probably equal to that of the feng shui masters of ancient China. The Romans adopted this Celtic Etruscan ritual of quartering and used it in the building of many of their towns and cities throughout their vast Empire, which the Saxons, under King Alfred, and Normans later copied.